Designer’s Guide to Spice and Spectre®

This is a guide to circuit simulators from a designer's perspective: the pitfalls of circuit simulation, such as convergence and accuracy problems, are documented. The text gives designers insight into why these problems occur and how to avoid them. It also provides practical advice on how to make many difficult measurements with a circuit simulator, such as loop gain of an op-amp or distortion measurements of such clocked circuits as d-to-a converters and sample-and-hold circuits. Finally, suggestions are given about how to handle difficult classes of circuits, such as oscillators, charge-storage or very large circuits.